Woody’s Maiden Voyage.

At the start of July I bought myself a new bike, rather than try and salvage an old one. Luckily, I still had all the extra bits like a waterproof jacket, helmet and lock so I was pretty set, but after building my new bike, it sat in the downstairs bathroom.

Being one who wants to fill my time off with decent activities, and being in a relationship with someone who likes to be active, this passed weekend, we set out on an adventure, with dual purposes.

It’s worth noting that the last time I rode a bike was when I was 16, and that ended in a collision which saw my head bounce off a country road and the experience has made me nervous for it ever since. That is, of course, forgetting a very brief excursion a year and a half ago when I was trying to be more active but ultimately that didn’t work.

So, purpose one: to do something more constructive with the time I have with my boyfriend. Whilst purpose two was: to find more Moths around the city centre.

It was a decently sunny day, with a few clouds lingering in the sky, but it wasn’t too bad. We stocked up on water to drinks, and I had made a picnic loaf for our lunch. We set out to try and reach the ferry terminal just outside the city centre, but thanks to the Siemens project, the way is blocked about a mile into it. Nevertheless, we improvised.

We ended up doubling back on ourselves, found a nice park for lunch, found out that it contained 4 PokéStops for Pokémon Go, and stayed there for a while, then headed off to The Deep to capture the moth they had there. We then spent about twenty minutes looking around the gift shop.

After that, we headed to the Yum Food Festival, which was packed and we had difficulty finding places to lock our bikes up, but we didn’t stop to purchase anything. The original plan was to hit it on the Friday when it would have been quieter, but good weather and the school holidays starting caused it to be a highly stressful detour.

So naturally we needed to find somewhere to unwind, which resulted in a Costa stop, where we equally had a hard time locking up our bikes, but we got two more moths from the experience.

In all, to say I’ve not ridden a bike in 11 years, we ended up doing a route that took is 11 miles around the city, when the city centre itself must measure just two miles across at it’s longest (total guess).

Nevertheless I have an itching for riding my bike now, which sort of plays into my hands fairly well when I have been considering getting rid of my car which is costing me an ever increasing amount just to make sure it functions as it should. But only time will tell if I switch horsepower for pedal power.